The life of his love

Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were familiar figures during my undergraduate years at Oxford in the mid-1950s, cycling around town together. He was a fairly junior tutor who'd come up after wartime army service, she (six years older) taught philosophy at St Anne's and had graduated just after the war started.

When they married in 1956 he'd published one little-known novel and she had gained a certain recognition with a monograph on Sartre and two novels that led to her being lumped in with Kingsley Amis and John Wain as a rebellious author of unconventional dons' fiction. When news of the forthcoming marriage broke, a friend of my mine quipped: 'We'll soon be hearing the patter of tiny novels'; indeed books, many not so little, were the progeny of a long, companionate marriage that lasted until Iris's death two years ago.

I didn't meet them until 40 years later when they were introduced to a group I was in at a party. They just stood there, saying little, looking beatific and holding each other in mutual dependency. None of us was aware that she was in an early stage of Alzheimer's.

Since seeing Richard Eyre's Iris I find it impossible to separate this fairly recent memory from Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent as Iris and John in the film. So authentic are their performances, they dispersed the qualms I had about intrusiveness when Bayley published this first of his two memoirs of Iris and Eyre announced he'd be adapting them for the screen. This delicate picture is both frank and reticent, never solemn, sentimental or ingratiating, and is by far Eyre's best piece of film-making since his robustly polemical debut with The Ploughman's Lunch in 1983.

Like the recent film version of Graham Swift's Last Orders, another British film dealing with love and death, Iris is set in the present with flashbacks, some just a few seconds long, back to the 1950s. Lookalike actors play the characters' younger selves. Kate Winslet as the younger Iris has the right mannerisms if not exactly the right appearance, but Hugh Bonneville's resemblance to the young John is uncanny.

The scenes from the past focus on the courtship between the vivacious, confident, bisexual Iris who's had a succession of distinguished lovers - historians, novelists, philosophers, economists - and John, the shy, stammering, sexually inexperienced Old Etonian whose eccentricity and awkwardness conceals a formidable intelligence. They come together as complementary figures, who share a passion for words and ideas and find the world an oddly comic place.

Though surrounded by friends and discharging professional obligations (he became Warton Professor of English), they lived in extreme Bohemian squalor. This is beautifully realised by production designer Gemma Jackson, and remarked on only by a glance of quizzical disdain from the woman policeman visiting the house. Rightly Eyre avoids any discussion of Iris's fiction other than noting the way it pursued recurrent themes of the search for happiness, the nature of goodness, the meaning of love.

The scenes in the present, roughly 1995 to 1999, see the onset and advance of Iris's Alzheimer's, a noble mind in the process of being o'erthrown. The disease is, I think, mentioned only once by name, when in an early morning rage in which John gives vent to his retrospective jealousy and rages against fate, he refers to Iris being possessed by 'Dr fucking Alzheimer'. The progress is slow, inexorable - difficulty with her final novel, drying on TV, loss of memory, inability to read, incontinence, watching the Teletubbies.

There's a particularly resonant image of the stricken Iris sitting on the beach at Southwold trying to start a novel but capable only of tearing blank pages from a notebook and placing them in rows with pebbles to keep them in place. But there are odd comic moments, one quite brilliant. She worries over her repetition and is unable to recall the name of the Prime Minister for a doctor ('surely someone must know?' she asks reasonably). Suddenly the name Tony Blair springs back into her mind, and shortly thereafter she sees his 1997 speech about 'education, education, education' and asks, again quite rightly: 'What does he mean by that?'

These later scenes remind one of the great performance Judi Dench gave at the National in 1982 as a woman awakened from decades in a coma from the drug L-Dopa in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska. This woman, a sentient child in a grown-up's body, is living briefly in a no man's land, neither awake nor asleep, a world of wonder where past and present co-exist. Dench in that play, and as Iris, does remarkable things with her eyes which are haunted, sad, vacant, suddenly illuminated by warmth and intelligence, simultaneously looking out and looking in.

Initially Iris knows what is happening to her and as an atheist and a person who lives by words she sees oblivion ahead - 'I feel as if I'm sailing into darkness', she says, as indeed we all are. Jim Broadbent is also excellent, showing John Bayley's devotion and responsibility, and that unconditional love that grows with time and continues when all else is gone. One leaves this distinguished movie thinking of that last line of Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb': 'What will survive of us is love.'